Monday, October 08, 2007

immediations

Nicole used to wield a quote by George Costanza's dad, Frank, who, finding that he had high blood pressure, was instructed by the cardiologist to say "serenity now".
Instead, he screamed it.

Nicole, right now, I feel the exact same way.

The trick to belief is not to notice it. It needs to be examined, of course, but the examination necessitates the suspension of the belief - and forgetting that belief is a dynamic process, will stop it all together.

As Paul Atreides says to the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother in Dune: 'A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it'.

But what happens when events challenge your beliefs and make them opaque? The casual individual may claim they have no beliefs, but that's because they're systemic: an augmentation of the mind, a vessel of extension... necessarily transparent. It takes but one confidence artist, but one mistaken attribution of character to make the believer pause and examine how their beliefs failed to uphold their view of the world (naught but projection of a personality to create a planet). And examination of belief, though perhaps clumsy and earnest and inexperienced, has a like form to belief itself: it is cast onto and informs the examiner of their world. And may cause them to question other things. One bad thing that interrupts a person (for belief IS that: a segment of person) can cause many more bad things to follow (a new tension of values allows a new world-scape to be envisioned).

Who's to say then that beliefs aren't the most dangerous thing we are dressed in? Maybe they should all be beaten on, cheated on, lied to, stolen from, let down, spat at, shat at, defrauded, denuded... so that real design of purpose takes their place? So our worlds are truly a process of choice, rather than a reflexive kick of seemingly inherited character projection?

But we all have vision, and we can all imagine... and in place of believing, in place of witnessing our beliefs in process, we can envision to become what we want. Maybe then we can imagine our serenity, even if we can't imagine our now.

3 comments:

Eve said...

I hate that. Seems to happen to me fairly frequently.

It's led me to:
lower expectations,
not trust (sad but true), and
try to strengthen my convictions.

That last one is the one I'm trying to work on, not in a delusional way, but in a realistic yet hopeful way. How do I do that? I have no idea, but it seems like a good idea, no?

Sparky said...

Frank Herbert and his funky quotes -- that one seems to capture the ineffable essence of being (yeah, I know, fucking corny...). There's an idea I'm pretty devoted to, called vitalism, that also seem encapsulated in that whole process bugaboo.

S'Mat said...

hahahaha eve! how you qualified the convictions part cracked me up... but i do so agree, especially with the trust issue, usually noticeable for me only by its absence.

sparky... i immediately went out and bought 2 vitalisms! by that i mean, i took a trip to my local wikipedia and looked at it some. its way chewier than i thought it would be, going to dig deeper when i can! all i can say right now is that any bugbear of reductionism is a teddybear of mine!